 Section 1 of THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES by Honoré de Belzac. Translated by Ellen Marrige. Section 1. One of those sites in which most horror is to be encountered is surely the general aspect of the Parisian populace. A people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests, beneath which are world along a crop of human beings, who are more often than not reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever. Men who's twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons, with which their brains are pregnant. Not faces so much as masks, masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy. All alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity. What is it they want, gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages, youth and decay. Youth one and colourless, decay painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast workshop of delights, from which in a short time they cannot even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue of Parisian faces. For it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, and lights up again with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, ever in fusion, seems to say after each completed work, pass on to another, just as nature says herself. Like nature herself, this social nature is busied with insects and flowers of a day. With ephemeral trifles, and so too it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analysing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out which bleaches and discolours tints with blue or brown individuals in more or less degree. By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns grey, like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect the Parisian, with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth, lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets, desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with indifference, his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or glass, as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed. There love is a desire, and hatred a whim. There's no true kinsman but the thousand-frank note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street, there is no one d'etat. There is no one absolutely useful or absolutely harmful, knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is tolerated, the government and the guillotine, religion and the color You are always acceptable to this world. You will never be missed by it. What then is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein however every sentiment, belief and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings of that thought which agitates, sustains and occupies it. And in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing. The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers to live. Well, this very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child and ties him to the wheel. The manufacturer, or I know not what secondary thread which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands mould and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out iron, turn wood and steel. Leave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate flowers, work woolensings, break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint carriages, blow glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble into leaves, labour on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach or blacken everything. Well, this middle man has come to that world of sweat and goodwill, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either in the name of the town's caprices, or with the voice of the monster-dubbed speculation. Thus these quadromains set themselves to watch, work and suffer, to fast, sweat and bestir them. Then careless of the future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter on his pallet, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays to the cabarets which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris. It is given up to actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose, are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it steals tomorrow's bread, the weak soup, the wife's dress, the child's wretched rags. Then born doubtless to be beautiful, for all creatures have a relative beauty, are enrolled from their childhood beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanised. Is not Vulcan with his hideousness and his strength the emblem of this strong and hideous nation, sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough in fine to take fire at a capulous word which signifies to it always gold and pleasure. If we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an arms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for the cabarets, would not the government be overturned every Tuesday? Happily by Tuesday this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is penniless, and returns to its labour, to dry bread, stimulated by a need of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. Nonetheless this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to neutralise the action of sorrow. Chance has made an artisan economical. Chance has favoured him with forethought. He has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and bound himself a father, and after some years of hard privation he embarks in some little draper's business, high as a shop. If neither sickness nor vice blocks his way, if he has prospered, there is the sketch of this normal life. And in the first place hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being composed of salt, peter, and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights, and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, liberty, and pleasure of his fellow citizens. This man solves the problem of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the constitutionnel, to his office, to the national guard, to the opera, and to God. But only in order that the constitutionnel, his office, the national guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be changed into coin. In fine hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up every day at five o'clock he traverses like a bird the space which separates his dwelling from the Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or thunder, rain or snow, he is at the constitutionnel, and waits there for the load of newspapers which he has undertaken to distribute. He receives this political bread with eagerness, takes it, bears it away. At nine o'clock he is in the bosom of his family, flings a jest to his wife, snatches a loud kiss from her, gulps down a cup of coffee, or scolds his children. At a quarter to ten he puts in an appearance at the mairie. There, stuck upon a stool, like a parrot on its perch, warmed by Paris town, he registers until four o'clock, with never a tear or a smile the deaths and births of an entire district. The sorrow, the happiness of the parish, flow beneath his pen, as the essence of the constitutionnel travelled before upon his shoulders. Nothing weighs upon him. He goes always straight before him, takes his patriotism ready made from the newspaper, contradicts no one, shouts or applaud with the world, and lives like a bird. Two yards from his parish, in the event of an important ceremony, he can yield his place to an assistant, and betake himself to chant a requiem from a stall in the church, of which on Sundays he is the fairest ornament, where his is the most imposing voice, where he distorts his huge mouth with energy to thunder out a joyous, amen. So is he chorister. At four o'clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has no time to be jealous, he is a man of action rather than of sentiment. His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter, their bright eyes storm the customers. He expands in the midst of all the finery, the lace and muslin kerchiefs that their cunning hands have wrought. Or again, more often still, before his dinner he waits on a client, copies the page of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that have been delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his post. A permanent base for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera, prepared to become a soldier or an Arab, prisoner, savage, peasant, spirit, camel's leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a eunuch, black or white, always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to hold his tongue, to hunt or fight for Rome or Egypt, but always at heart a huckster still. At midnight he returns, a man, the good husband, the tender father. He slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the elusive forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the prophet of conjugal love, the world's depravities, the voluptuous curves of Talioni's leg. And finally if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries through his slumber as he does his life. This man sums up all things, history, literature, politics, government, religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopedia, a grotesque atlas, ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held according to certain leisured philosophers to be happier than the huckster is. The one perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight industries, from the labour of his shoulders, his throat, his hands, from his wife and his business, the one derives, as from so many farms, children, some thousands of francs, and the most laborious happiness that has ever diverted the heart of man. His fortune and these children, or the children who sum up everything for him, become the prey of the world above, to which he brings his duckets and his daughter, or his son, reared at college, who with more education than his father, raises higher his ambitious gaze. Then the son of a retail tradesman would feign be something in the state. Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian sphere. Go up one story then, and descend to the entre-suls, or climb down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor. In fine penetrate into the world which has possessions. The same result, wholesale merchants and their men, people with small banking accounts and much integrity, rogues and cats-paws, clerks old and young, sheriffs clerks, barristers clerks, solicitors clerks. In fine all the working, thinking and speculating members of that lower middle class, which honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary, accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have made, preserves the fruits of the south, the fishes, the wine from every sun-favoured hill, which stretches its hands over the Orient, and takes from it the shawls that the rusts and the turk despise, which harvests even from the indies, crouches down in expectation of a sale greedy of profit, which discounts bills, turns over and collects all kinds of securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the fantasies of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age, sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions, which torture the educated portion of this monstrous city. Just as in the case of the proletariat it is brought about by the cruel seesaw of the material elaborations perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic, I will. Here too then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four and twenty hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age. Only the working man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted growth expires, whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him with his worn, flat, old face, with no light in his eyes, with no strength in his limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard, the belt of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the National Guard, a permanent stockpot, a decent plot in Père Lachaise, and for his old age a little gold honestly earned. His Monday is on Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage, a country excursion during which his wife and children gloved themselves merrily with dust or bask in the sun. His dissipation is at the restaurateurs, whose poisonous dinner has won renown, or at some family ball where he suffocates till midnight. Some fools are surprised at the fantasmagoria of the monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water. But what would Abelay's Gaugantua, that misunderstood figure of an audacity so sublime, what would that giant say fallen from the celestial spheres if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have you seen one of those little constructions, cold in summer, and with no other warmth than a small stove in winter, placed beneath the vast copper dome which crowns the Al Obley? Madame is there by morning. She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation twelve thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is up, passes into a gloomy office where he lends money till the weekend to the tradesmen of his district. By nine o'clock he is at the passport office of which he is one of the minor officials. By evening he is at the box office of the Théâtre Italien, or of any other theatre you like. The children are put out to nurse, and only return to be sent to college or to boarding school. Monsieur and Madame live on the third floor, have but one cook, give dances in a saddle twelve foot by eight lit by argon lamps, but they give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to their daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an age where they begin to show themselves on the balcony of the opera, in a fiac at L'Enchamps, or on sunny days in faded clothes on the boulevard, the fruit of all this sewing. Respected by their neighbours, in good odour with the government, connected with the upper middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five the cross of the Legion of Honor, and his daughter's father-in-law, a parochial mayor, invites him to his evenings. These life-long labours, then, offer the good of the children, whom these lower middle classes are inevitably driven to exalt. Thus each sphere directs all its efforts towards the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer becomes a notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. No link is wanting in the chain, and everything stimulates the upward march of money. Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which perhaps will someday find its dante. In this third social circle a sort of Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and where they are condensed into the form known as business, their moves and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd of lawyers, doctors, notaries, counsellors, businessmen, bankers, big merchants, speculators and magistrates. Here are to be found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere. These people, almost all of them, live in unhealthy offices, in fetid anti-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend their days bowed down beneath the weight of affairs. They rise at dawn to be in time, not to be left behind, to gain all, or not to lose, to overreach a man or his money, to open or wind up some business, to take advantage of some fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or set him free. They infect their horses, they overdrive and age and break them, like their own legs, before their time. Time is their tyrant. It fails them, it escapes them. They can neither expand it nor cut it short. What soul can remain great, pure, moral and generous, and consequently what face retain its beauty in this depraving practice of a calling which compels one to bear the weight of the public sorrows, to analyse them, to weigh them, estimate them, and mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside their hearts? I do not know, but they leave them somewhere or other, when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there is no such thing as mystery. They see the reverse side of society whose confessors they are and despise it. Then whatever they do, according to their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or else out of lassitude or some secret compromise espouse it. In fine they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws and his institutions, make them steel like jackals from corpses that are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without arrest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great merchant nor the judge nor the pleader preserves his sense of right. They feel no more. They apply set rules that leave cases out of count. Born along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers. They glide on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return to their homes, they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into society where they can make clients, acquaintances, protectors. They all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces become bloated, flushed and emaciated. To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold moral contradictions, they oppose, not indeed pleasure, it would be too pale a contrast, but debauchery. A debauchery both secret and alarming, for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it, so that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be skeptics, and are in reality simpletons. They swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary or political prejudices to do away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard of the Code or the Tribunal of Commerce. Having started early to become men of note, they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the deceitful colouring, those dull tarnished eyes, and garrulous sensual mouths, in which the observer recognises the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought, and its rotation in the circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain, and the gift of seeing in large, of generalising and deducing. No man who has allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear of these huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either he has practised little, or he is an exception, a bisha who dies young. If a great merchant, something remains, he is almost Jacques Curre. Did Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who, moreover, has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and Robespierre, however lofty they were? These men of affairs, par excellence, attract money to them, and hoard it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic families. If the ambition of the working man is that of the small tradesmen, here, too, are the same passions. The type of this class might be either an ambitious bourgeois who, after a life of privation and continual scheming, passes into the council of state, as an aunt passes through a chink, or some newspaper editor, jaded with intrigue, whom the king makes appear of France, perhaps to revenge himself on the nobility, or some notary become mayor of his parish. All people crushed with business, who if they attain their end, are literally killed in its attainment. In France the usage is to glorify wigs. Napoleon, Louis says, the great rulers alone have always wished for young men to fulfil their projects. Above this sphere the artist world exists. But here, too, the faces stamped with the seal of originality are worn, nobly indeed, but worn, fatigued, nervous, harassed by a need of production, outrun by their costly fantasies, worn out by devouring genius, hungry for pleasure. The artists of Paris would all regain by excessive labour what they have lost by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and glory, money and art. To begin with, the artist is ceaselessly panting under his creditors. His necessities beget his debts, and his debts require of him his nights. After his labour is pleasure. The comedian plays till midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon. The sculptor is bent before his statue. The journalist is a marching thought, like the soldier when at war. The painter who is the fashion is crushed with work. The painter with no occupation, if he feels himself to be a man of genius, gnaws his entrails. Competition, rivalry, calumny, assail talent. Some in desperation plunge into the abyss of vice. Others die young and unknown because they have discounted their future too soon. Few of these figures, originally sublime, remain beautiful. On the other hand, the flagrant beauty of their heads is not understood. An artist's face is always exorbitant. It is always above or below the conventional lines of what fools call the beau idéal. What power is it that destroys them? Passion. Every passion in Paris resolves into two terms, gold and pleasure. Now, do you not breathe again? Do you not feel air and space purified? Here is neither labour nor suffering. The soaring arch of gold has reached the summit. From the lowest gutters, where its stream commences. From the little shops, where it is stopped by puny coffer dams. From the heart of the counting-houses and great workshops, where its volume is that of ingots. Gold, in the shape of dowries and inheritances, guided by the hands of young girls, or the bony fingers of age, courses towards the aristocracy, where it will become a blazing expansive stream. But before leaving the four territories upon which the utmost wealth of Paris is based, it is fitting, having cited the moral causes, to deduce those which are physical, and to call attention to a pestilence, latent as it were, which incessantly acts upon the faces of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper. To point out a deleterious influence, the corruption of which equals that of the Parisian administrators, who allow it so complacently to exist. If the air of the houses in which the greater proportion of the middle classes live is noxious, if the atmosphere of the streets belches out cruel miasmas into stuffy back-kitchens, where there is little air, realize that, apart from this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of this great city have their foundations in filth, which the powers that be have not yet seriously attempted to enclose with mortar walls, solid enough to prevent even the most fetid mud from filtering through the soil, poisoning the wells, and maintaining subterraneously to Loutetia the tradition of her celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps amidst the putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers. But let us turn to the vast saloons, gilded and airy, the hotels in their gardens, the rich, indolent, happy, moneyed world. There the faces are lined and scarred with vanity. There nothing is real. To seek for pleasure is it not to find ennui. People in society have at an early age warped their nature. Having no occupation other than to wallow in pleasure, they have speedily misused their sense, as the artisan has misused brandy. Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances. In order to obtain constantly the same effects, the doses must be doubled, and death or degradation is contained in the last. All the lower classes are on their knees before the wealthy, and watch their tastes in order to turn them into vices and exploit them. Thus you see in these folk at an early age tastes instead of passions. Romantic fantasies and lukewarm loves. Their impotence reigns. Their ideas have ceased. They have evaporated, together with energy, amongst the affectations of the boudoir and the cajolments of women. There are fledglings of forty, old doctors of sixty years. The wealthy obtain in Paris ready-made wit and science, formulated opinions which save them the need of having wit, science or opinion of their own. The irrationality of this world is equaled by its weakness and its licentiousness. It is greedy of time to the point of wasting it. Seeking it for affection, as little as for ideas. Its kisses conceal a profound indifference. Its urbanity a perpetual contempt. It has no other fashion of love. Flashes of wit without profundity. A wealth of indiscretion, scandal, and above all, common place. Such is the sum of its speech. But these happy fortunates pretend that they do not meet to make and repeat maxims in the manner of La Rochefoucault, as though they did not exist a mean, invented by the eighteenth century, between a superfluity and an absolute blank. If a few men of character indulge in witticism, at once subtle and refined, they are misunderstood. Soon tired of giving without receiving, they remain at home, and leave fools to reign over their territory. This hollow life, this perpetual expectation of a pleasure which never comes, this permanent ennui and emptiness of soul, heart, and mind, the lassitude of the upper Parisian world is reproduced on its features, and stamps its parchment faces, its premature wrinkles, that physiognomy of the wealthy upon which impotence has set its grimace, in which gold is mirrored, and whence intelligence has fled. Such a view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be other than it is. This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius, and leads human civilisation. It is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with second sight, who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician's disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil, battle and victory, the moral combat of eighty-nine, the clarion calls of which still re-echo in every corner of the world, and also the downfall of eighteen hundred and fourteen. Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean than the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire when they cleave the waves. Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality sometimes allows. The city of Paris has her great mast, all of bronze, carved with victories, and for watchman, Napoléon. The bark may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, plows the seas of science, rides with full sail, cries from the height of her tops with the voice of her scientists and artists, onward, advance, follow me. She carries a huge crew which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers, boys and urchins laughing in the rigging, ballast of heavy bourgeoisie, working men and sailor men touched with tar, in her cabins the lucky passengers, elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the bulwarks, then on the deck her soldiers, innovators or ambitious would accost every fresh shore and shooting out their bright lights upon it ask for glory which is pleasure or for love which needs gold. Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the cruelties of the artist's thought and the excessive pleasure which is sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes, their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run and leap and drive whipped on by an inexorable goddess necessity, the necessity for money, glory and amusement. Thus any face which is fresh and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is in Paris the most extraordinary of exceptions. It is met with rarely. Should you see one there, be sure it belongs either to a young and ardent ecclesiastic or to some good abbey of forty with three chins, to a young girl of pure life, such as is brought up in certain middle class families, to a mother of twenty still full of illusions as she suckles her first born, to a young man newly embarked from the provinces and entrusted to the care of some devout dowager who keeps him without a sue, or perhaps to some shop assistant who goes to bed at midnight, wearied out with folding and unfolding calico, and rises at seven o'clock to arrange the window. Often again to some man of science or poetry who lives monastically in the embrace of a fine idea, who remains sober, patient and chaste, else to some self-contented fool feeding himself on folly, reeking of health in a perpetual state of absorption with his own smile, or to the soft and happy race of loungers, the only folk really happy in Paris, which unfolds for them hour by hour its moving poetry. Nevertheless there is in Paris a proportion of privileged beings to whom this excessive movement of industries, interests, affairs, arts and gold is profitable. These beings are women. Although they also have a thousand secret causes which hear more than elsewhere destroy their physiognomy. There are to be found in the feminine world little happy colonies who live in oriental fashion and can preserve their beauty. But these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets. They lie hid like rare plants who only unfold their petals at certain hours and constitute veritable exotic exceptions. However Paris is essentially the country of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare there, there also are to be found as elsewhere noble friendships and unlimited devotion. On this battlefield of interests and passions, just as in the midst of those marching societies where egoism triumphs, where everyone is obliged to defend himself and which we call armies, it seems as though sentiments like to be complete when they showed themselves and are sublime by juxtaposition. So it is with faces. In Paris one sometimes sees in the aristocracy set like stars the ravishing faces of young people, the fruit of quite exceptional manners and education. To the youthful beauty of the English stock they unite the firmness of southern trees, the fire of their eyes, a delicious bloom on their lips, the lustrous black of their soft locks, a white complexion, a distinguished cast of features, render them the flowers of the human race, magnificent to behold against the mass of other faces, worn, old, wrinkled and grimacing. So women too admire such young people with that eager pleasure which men take in watching a pretty girl, elegant, gracious, and embellished with all the virginal charms with which our imagination pleases to adorn the perfect woman. If this hurried glance at the population of Paris has enabled us to conceive the rarity of a Raphaelesque face, and the passionate admiration which such and one must inspire at the first sight, the prime interest of our history will have been justified, quad erat demonstrandum, if one may be permitted to apply scholastic formulae to the science of manners. End of section one. Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey. Section two of The Girl with the Golden Eyes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Giesen. The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac. Translated by Ellen Marridge. Section two. Upon one of those fine spring mornings, when the leaves, although unfolded, are not yet green, when the sun begins to guild the roofs and the sky is blue, when the population of Paris issues from its cells to swarm along the boulevard, glides like a serpent of a thousand coils through the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries, saluting the high manille magnificence which the country puts on. On one of those joyous days, then, a young man as beautiful as the day itself, dressed with taste, easy of manner. To let out the secret, he was a love-child, the natural son of Lord Dudley, and the famous Marquis de Vardac, was walking in the great avenue of the Tuileries. This Adonis, by name Henri de Marseille, was born in France, when Lord Dudley had just married the young lady, already Henri's mother, to an old gentleman called Monsieur de Marseille. This faded and almost extinguished butterfly recognized the child as his own, in consideration of the life interest in a fund of a hundred thousand francs, definitively assigned to his putative son. A generosity which did not cost Lord Dudley too dear, French funds were worth at that time, seventeen francs, fifty centimes. The old gentleman died without having ever known his wife. Madame de Marseille subsequently married the Marquis de Vardac, but before becoming a Marquis, she showed very little anxiety as to her son and Lord Dudley. To begin with, the declaration of war between France and England had separated the two lovers, and fidelity at all costs was not, and never will be, the fashion of Paris. Then the successes of the woman, elegant, pretty, universally adored, crushed in the Parisienne the maternal sentiment. Lord Dudley was no more troubled about his offspring than was the mother. The speedy infidelity of a young girl he had ardently loved gave him perhaps a sort of aversion for all that issued from her. Moreover, fathers can perhaps only love the children with whom they are fully acquainted. A social belief of the utmost importance for the peace of families, which should be held by all the celibate, proving as it does that paternity is a sentiment nourished artificially by woman, custom, and the law. Poor Henri de Marseille knew no other father than that one of the two who was not compelled to be one. The paternity of Monsieur de Marseille was naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting instance that children have a father, and Monsieur de Marseille imitated nature. The worthy man would not have sold his name, had he been free from vices. Thus he squandered without remorse in gambling hells, and drank elsewhere the few dividends which the national treasury paid to its bondholders. Then he handed over the child to an aged sister, a demoiselle de Marseille, who took much care of him, and provided him out of the meagre some allowed by her brother, with a tutor, an abbey without a farthing, who took the measure of the youth's future, and determined to pay himself out of the hundred thousand livres for the care given to his pupil, for whom he conceived an affection. As chance had it, this tutor was a true priest, one of those ecclesiastics cut out to become cardinals in France, or Borges beneath the tiara. He taught the child in three years what he might have learned at college in ten. Then the great man, by the name the abbey de Maronis, completed the education of his pupil by making him study civilisation under all its aspects. He nourished him on his experience, led him little into churches which at that time were closed, introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of theatres, more often into the houses of courtesans. He exhibited human emotions to him one by one, taught him politics in the drawing-rooms, where they simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of government, and endeavoured out of attraction towards a fine nature, deserted yet rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother, is not the church the mother of orphans. The pupil was responsive to so much care. The worthy priest died in 1812, a bishop, with the satisfaction of having left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well moulded that he could outwit a man of forty, who would have expected to have found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external trays as seductive as ever the old painters, those naive artists, had given to the serpent in the terrestrial paradise. Nor was that all. In addition, the good-natured prelate had procured for the child of his choice certain acquaintances in the best Parisian society which might equal in value in the young man's in the young man's hand another hundred thousand invested livres. In fine this priest, vicious but politic, sceptical yet learned, treacherous yet amiable, weak in appearance yet as vigorous physically as intellectually, was so genuinely useful to his pupil, so complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds of strength, so profound when it was needful to make some human reckoning, so youthful at table, at frascati, at, I know not where, that the grateful Henri de Marseille was hardly moved at Orte in 1814, except when he looked at the portrait of his beloved bishop, the only personal possession which the prelate had been able to bequeath him. Admirable type of the men whose genius will preserve the Catholic apostolic and Roman church, compromised for the moment by the feebleness of its recruits, and the decrepit age of its pontiffs, but if the church likes. The continental war prevented young de Marseille from knowing his real father. It is doubtful whether he was aware of his name. A deserted child, he was equally ignorant of Madame de Marseille. Naturally he had little regret for his putative father. As for Madame de Marseille, his only mother, he built for her a hansome little monument in Perla-Chez when she died. Monseigneur de Maronis had guaranteed to this old lady one of the best places in the skies, so that when he saw her die happy, Henri gave her some egotistical tears. He began to weep on his own account. Observing this grief, the abbey dried his pupils' tears, bidding him observe that the good woman took her snuff most offensively, and was becoming so ugly and deaf and tedious that he ought to return thanks for her death. The bishop had emancipated his pupil in 1811. Then when the mother of Monseigneur de Marseille remarried, the priest chose in her family council one of those honest dullards, picked out by him through the windows of the confessional, and charged him with the administration of the fortune, the revenues of which he was willing to apply to the needs of the community, but of which he wished to preserve the capital. Towards the end of 1814 then, Henri de Marseille had no sentiment of obligation in the world, and was as free as an unmated bird. Although he had lived twenty-two years, he appeared to be barely seventeen. As a rule the most fastidious of his rivals considered him to be the prettiest youth in Paris. From his father, Lord Dudley, he had derived a pair of the most amorously deceiving blue eyes. From his mother, the busiest of black hair, from both pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle and modest expression, a refined and aristocratic figure, and beautiful hands. For a woman to see him was to lose her head for him, do you understand to conceive one of those desires which eat the heart, which are forgotten because of the impossibility of satisfying them, because women in Paris are commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to themselves, after the fashion of men, the je maintiendrai of the house of orange. Underneath this fresh young life, and in spite of the limpid springs in his eyes, Henri had a lion's courage, a monkey's agility. He could cut a ball in half at ten paces on the blade of a knife. He rode his horse in a way that made you realise the fable of the centaur. Drove a fore in hand with grace, was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb, but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of savat or cudgels. Moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have enabled him to become an artist, should he fall on calamity, and owned a voice which would have been worth to Barbaya fifty thousand francs a season. Alas, that all these fine qualities, these pretty faults, were tarnished by one abominable vice. He believed neither in man nor woman, God nor devil. Capricious nature had commenced by endowing him. A priest had completed the work. To render this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to reproduce samples of such a delicious pattern. His second masterpiece of this kind was a young girl named Ufemi, born of a Spanish lady reared in Havana, and brought to Madrid with a young Creole woman of the Antilles, and with all the ruinous tastes of the colonies, but fortunately married to an old and extremely rich Spanish noble, Don Ijos, Marquis de San Real, who since the occupation of Spain by French troops had taken up his abode in Paris, and lived in the Rue Salazar. As much from indifferences from any respect for the innocence of youth, Lord Dudley was not in the habit of keeping his children informed of the relations he created for them in all parts. That is a slightly inconvenient form of civilisation. It has so many advantages that we must overlook its drawbacks in consideration of its benefits. Lord Dudley, to make no more words of it, came to Paris in 1816 to take refuge from the pursuit of English justice, which protects nothing oriental except commerce. The exiled Lord, when he saw Henri, asked who that handsome young man might be. Then upon hearing the name, ah, it is my son. What a pity, he said. Such was the story of the young man who about the middle of the month of April, 1815, was walking indolently up the broad avenue of the Tuileries, after the fashion of all those animals who, knowing their strength, pass along in majesty and peace. Middle-class matrons turned back naively to look at him again. Other women, without turning round, waited for him to pass again, and engraved him in their minds, that they might remember in due season that fragrant face, which would not have disadorned the body of the fairest among themselves. What are you doing here on Sunday? said the marquis de Rancerelle to Henri as he passed. There's a fish in the net, answered the young man. This exchange of thoughts was accomplished by means of two significant glances, without it appearing that either de Rancerelle or de Marseille had any knowledge of the other. The young man was taking note of the passers-by with that promptitude of eye and ear, which is peculiar to the Parisian, who seems at first to see and hear nothing, but who sees and hears all. At that moment a young man came up to him, and took him familiarly by the arm, saying to him, How are you, my dear de Marseille? Extremely well, de Marseille answered, with that air of apparent affection, which amongst the young men of Paris proves nothing, either for the present or the future. In effect the youth of Paris resemble the youth of no other town. They may be divided into two classes, the young man who has something, and the young man who has nothing, or the young man who thinks and he who spends. But, be it well understood, this applies only to those natives of the soil, who maintain in Paris the delicious course of the elegant life. There exist as well plenty of other young men, but they are children who are late in conceiving Parisian life, and who remain its dupes. They do not speculate, they study, they fag, as the others say. Finally there are to be found besides certain young people, rich or poor, who embrace careers, and follow them with a single heart. They are somewhat like the Emil of Housseau, of the flesh of citizens, and they never appear in society. The diplomatic, impolitely dubbed them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prize-men infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the country, and constitute in some manner, in the body politic, a lymph which infects it and renders it flabby. These honest folk call men of talent immoral or rogues. If such rogues require to be paid for their services, at least their services are there, whereas the other sorts do harm, and are respected by the mob, but happily for France, elegant youth stigmatizes them ceaselessly under the name of Loutes. At the first glance, then, it is natural to consider as very distinct the two sorts of young men who lead the life of elegance, the amiable corporation to which Henri de Marseille belonged. But the observer who goes beyond the superficial aspect of things is soon convinced that the difference is purely moral, and that nothing is so deceptive as this pretty outside. Nevertheless, all alike take precedence over everybody else, speak rightly or wrongly of things, of men, literature, and the fine arts, have ever in their mouth the pit and coborg of each year, interrupt a conversation with a pun, turn into ridicule, science, and those savants, despise all things which they do not know or which they fear, set themselves above all by constituting themselves the supreme judges of all. They would all hoax their fathers and be ready to shed crocodile tears upon their mother's breasts, but generally they believe in nothing, blaspheme women, or play at modesty, and in reality are led by some old woman or an evil courtesan. They are all equally eaten to the bone with calculation, with depravity, with a brutal lust to succeed, and if you plumbed for their hearts, you would find in all a stone. In their normal state they have the prettiest exterior, stake their friendship at every turn, are captivating alike. The same badinage dominates their ever-changing jargon. They seek for oddity in their toilette, glory in repeating the stupidities of such-and-such actor who is in fashion, and commence operations, it matters not with whom, with contempt and impertinence, in order to have, as it were, the first move in the game. But woe betide him who does not know how to take a blow on one cheek, for the sake of rendering, too. They resemble, in fine, that pretty white spray which crests the stormy waves. They dress and dance, dine and take their pleasure on the day of Waterloo, in the time of cholera or revolution. Finally their expenses are all the same, but here the contrast comes in. Of this fluctuating fortune so agreeably flung away, some possess the capital for which the others wait. They have the same tailors, but the bills of the latter are still to pay. Next, if the first, like sieves, take in ideas of all kinds without retaining any, the latter compare them and assimilate all the good. If the first believe they know something, know nothing and understand everything, lend all to those who need nothing, and offer nothing to those who are in need. The latter study secretly others' thoughts, and place out their money, like their follies at big interest. The one class have no more faithful impressions, because their soul, like a mirror worn from use, no longer reflects any image. The others economize their senses and life, even while they seem like the first to be flinging them away broadcast. The first, on the faith of a hope, devote themselves without conviction to a system which has wind and tide against it, but they leap upon another political craft when the first goes adrift. The second take the measure of the future, sound it, and see in political fidelity what the English see in commercial integrity, an element of success. Where the young man of possessions makes a pun or an epigram upon the restoration of the throne, he who has nothing makes a public calculation or a secret reservation, and obtains everything by giving a handshake to his friends. The one deny every faculty to others, look upon all their ideas as new, as though the world had been made yesterday. They have unlimited confidence in themselves, and no crueler enemy than those same selves. But the others are armed with an incessant distrust of men, whom they estimate at their value, and are sufficiently profound to have one thought beyond their friends, whom they exploit. Then of evenings, when they lay their heads on their pillows, they weigh men as a miser weighs his gold pieces. The one are vexed at aimless impertinence, and allow themselves to be ridiculed by the diplomatic, who make them dance for them by pulling what is the main string of these puppets, their vanity. Thus a day comes when those who had nothing have something, have something, and those who had something have nothing. The latter look at their comrades who have achieved positions as cunning fellows. Their hearts may be bad, but their heads are strong. He is very strong, is the supreme praise according to those who have attained quibus concueruis, political rank, a woman, or a fortune. Amongst them are to be found certain young men who play this role by commencing with having debts. Naturally these are more dangerous than those who play it without a farthing. End of Section 2 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmeyer Surrey. Section 3 of The Girl with the Golden Eyes This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Martin Giesen. The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac Translated by Ellen Marrige Section 3 The young man who called himself a friend of Henri de Marseille was a rattlehead who had come from the provinces, and whom the young men then in fashion were teaching the art of running through an inheritance. But he had one last leg to stand on in his province, in the shape of a secure establishment. He was simply an heir who had passed without any transition from the pittance of a hundred francs a month to the entire paternal fortune. And who, if he had not wit enough to perceive that he was laughed at, was sufficiently cautious to stop short at two-thirds of his capital. He had learned at Paris, for a consideration of some thousands of francs, the exact value of harness, the art of not being too respectful to his gloves, learned to make skillful meditations upon the right wages to give people, and to seek out what bargain was the best to close with them. He set store on his capacity to speak in good terms of his horses, of his Pyrenean hound, to tell by her dress, her walk, her shoes, to what class a woman belonged, to study et carte, remember a few fashionable catch words, and win by his sojourn in Parisian society the necessary authority to import later into his province a taste for tea and silver of an English fashion, and to obtain the right of despising everything around him for the rest of his days. De Marseille had admitted him to his society in order to make use of him in the world, just as a bold speculator employs a confidential clerk. The friendship, real or faint of De Marseille, was a social position for Paul de Manerville, who on his side thought himself astute in exploiting, after his fashion, his intimate friend. He lived in the reflecting luster of his friend, walked constantly under his umbrella, wore his boots, gilded himself with his rays. When he posed in Henri's company, or walked at his side, he had the air of saying, don't insult us, we are real dogs. He often permitted himself to remark fatuously. If I were to ask Henri for such and such a thing, he is a good enough friend of mine to do it. But he was careful never to ask anything of him. He feared him, and his fear, although imperceptible, reacted upon the others, and was of use to De Marseille. De Marseille is a man of a thousand, said Paul. Ah, you will see, he will be what he likes. I should not be surprised to find him one of these days minister of foreign affairs. Nothing can withstand him. He made of De Marseille what corporal trim made of his cap, a perpetual instance. Ask De Marseille, and you will see. Or again, the other day we were hunting De Marseille and I. He would not believe me, but I jumped a hedge without moving on my horse. Or again, we were with some women, De Marseille and I, and upon my word of honour, I was etc. Thus Paul de Manerville could not be classed among the great illustrious and powerful family of fools who succeed. He would one day be a deputy, for the time he was not even a young man. His friend De Marseille defined him thus. You ask me what is Paul? Paul, why, Paul de Manerville. I am surprised, my dear fellow, he said to De Marseille, to see you here on a Sunday. I was going to ask you the same question. Is it an intrigue? An intrigue. I can mention it to you without compromising my passion. Besides, a woman who comes to the Trillerie on Sundays is of no account, aristocratically speaking. Hold your tongue then, or I shall tell you nothing. Your laugh is too loud. You will make people think that we have lunged too well. Last Thursday, here on the terrace de Feuillon, I was walking along, thinking of nothing at all, but when I got to the gate of the Rue de Castillon, by which I intended to leave, I came face to face with a woman, or rather a young girl, who, if she did not throw herself at my head, stopped short, less I think, from human respect, than from one of those movements of profound surprise, which affect the limbs, creep down the length of the spine, and cease only in the sole of the feet, to nail you to the ground. I have often produced effects of this nature, sort of animal magnetism, which becomes enormously powerful when the relations are reciprocally precise. But, my dear fellow, this was not stupid faction, nor was she a common girl. Morally speaking, her face seemed to say, What is it you, my ideal, the creation of my thoughts, of my morning and evening dreams? What are you there? Why this morning, why not yesterday? Take me, I am thine, etc. Gourd, I said to myself, another one. Then I scrutinise her. Oh, my dear fellow, speaking physically, my incognita is the most adorable feminine person whom I ever met. She belongs to that feminine variety, which the Romans call fullua flower, the woman of fire. And in chief, what struck me the most, what I am still taken with, are her two yellow eyes, like a tiger's, a golden yellow that gleams, living gold, gold which thinks, gold which loves, and is determined to take refuge in your pocket. My dear fellow, we are full of her, cried Paul. She comes here sometimes, the girl with the golden eyes. That is the name we have given her. She is a young creature, not more than twenty-two, and I have seen her here in the time of the Bourbon, but with a woman who was worth a hundred thousand of her. Silence, Paul. It is impossible for any woman to surpass this girl. She is like the cat who rubs herself against your legs. A white girl with ash-coloured hair, delicate in appearance, but who must have downy threads on the third phalanx of her fingers, and all along her cheeks, a white down, whose line luminous on fine days begins at her ears and loses itself on her neck. Ah, the other, my dear de Marseille! She has black eyes which have never wept, but which burn, black eyebrows which meet and give her an air of hardness, contradicted by the compact curve of her lips, on which the kisses do not stay, lips burning and fresh, a moreish colour that warms a man like the sun, but upon my word of honour she is like you. You flatter her. A firm figure, the tapering figure of a corvette built for speed, which rushes down upon the merchant vessel with French impetuosity, which grapples with her and sinks her at the same time. After all, my dear fellow, answered de Marseille, what has that got to do with me, since I have never seen her? Ever since I have studied women, my incognita is the only one whose virginal bosom, whose ardent and voluptuous forms, have realised for me the only woman of my dreams, of my dreams. She is the original of that ravishing picture, called la femme caressant sa chimère, the warmest, the most infernal inspiration of the genius of antiquity. A holy poem, prostituted by those who have copied it for frescoes and mosaics, for a heap of bourgeois who see in this gem nothing more than a gugore, and hang it on their watchchains, whereas it is the whole woman, an abyss of pleasure into which one plunges and finds no end, whereas it is the ideal woman to be seen sometimes in reality, in Spain or Italy, almost never in France. Well, I have again seen this girl of the gold eyes, this woman caressing her chimère. I saw her on Friday. I had a presentiment that on the following day she would be here at the same hour. I was not mistaken. I have taken a pleasure in following her without being observed, in studying her indolent walk, the walk of the woman without occupation, but in the movements of which one divines all the pleasure that lies asleep. Well, she turned back again. She saw me. Once more she adored me. Once more trembled, shivered. It was then I noticed the genuine Spanish duena who looked after her, a hyena upon whom some jealous man has put a dress, a sheed of all well-paid, no doubt, to guard this delicious creature. Then the duena made me deeper in love. I grew curious. On Saturday nobody. And here I am today, waiting for this girl whose chimera I am, asking nothing better than to pose as the monster in the fresco. There she is, said Paul. Everyone is turning round to look at her. The unknown blushed. Her eyes shone. She saw Henri. She shut them and passed by. You say that she notices you, cried Paul facetiously. The duena looked fixedly and attentively at the two young men. When the unknown and Henri passed each other again, the young girl touched him, and with her hand pressed the hand of the young man. Then she turned her head and smiled with passion. But the duena led her away very quickly to the gate of the Rue de Castillon. The two friends followed the young girl, admiring the magnificent grace of the neck which met her head in a harmony of vigorous lines, and upon which a few coils of hair were tightly wound. The girl with the golden eyes had that well-knitted, arched, slender foot which presents so many attractions to the dainty imagination. Moreover, she was shod with elegance and wore a short skirt. During her course she turned from time to time to look at Henri, and appeared to follow the old woman regretfully, seeming to be at once her mistress and her slave. She could break her with blows, but could not dismiss her. All that was perceptible. The two friends reached the gate. Two men in livery let down the step of a tasteful coupé, emblazoned with armorial bearings. The girl with the golden eyes was the first to enter it, took her seat at the side where she could be best seen when the carriage turned, put her hand on the door, and waved her handkerchief in the duenas despite. In contempt of what might be said by the curious, the handkerchief cried to Henri openly, follow me. Have you ever seen a handkerchief better thrown? C'est Henri to Paul de Manerville. Then, observing a fiacre on the point of departure, having just set down a fare, he made a sign to the driver to wait. Follow that carriage, notice the house and the street where it stops. You shall have ten francs. Paul adjeure. The cab followed the coupé. The coupé stopped in the Rue Saint-Nazaire, before one of the finest houses of the neighbourhood. End of section three. Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere, Surrey.